| I think we deserve credit, those of us who opposed this dumb invasion, for having a little wisdom in wanting our countrymen the hell out of there. Kenneth Pollack was wrong and Scott Ritter was right and some of us knew who to listen to.
I grew up in the '60s with parents saying, about Vietnam, "we can't pull out, there'll be a bloodbath when we leave!" (Who killed millions of Vietnamese? We did! When did it stop? When we left!)
Iraq looks more and more like Nam every day. American generals blockading and bombing Fallujah because some mercenaries got killed there. The generals are mad because newly-minted Iraqi security forces are refusing to "fight Iraqis." The President is being filmed catching bass for a fishing show. What a quack operation.
If the Iraqis hadn't been crippled with sanctions and had been able to take care of Saddam themselves, the same "power vacuum" would exist, exposing the same old rivalries, etc. The boundaries of Iraq were arbitrarily drawn by colonial powers decades ago, and there may very well be some redrawing of those boundaries after colonial powers are gone. It's for the Iraqis to determine, not hamfisted fuckups of the West.
Are you saying we should care for humanitarian reasons? We've killed 10,000 Iraqis in a year! Is it because of the oil? Or Israel? If it's the latter two reasons, we should be having a national discussion about this and quit making stuff up about why we're there. In the meantime, we shoud be planning our exit strategy and looking for less volatile fuel sources.
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I grew up in the '60s with parents saying, about Vietnam, "we can't pull out, there'll be a bloodbath when we leave!" (Who killed millions of Vietnamese? We did! When did it stop? When we left!)
Iraq looks more and more like Nam every day. American generals blockading and bombing Fallujah because some mercenaries got killed there. The generals are mad because newly-minted Iraqi security forces are refusing to "fight Iraqis." The President is being filmed catching bass for a fishing show. What a quack operation.
If the Iraqis hadn't been crippled with sanctions and had been able to take care of Saddam themselves, the same "power vacuum" would exist, exposing the same old rivalries, etc. The boundaries of Iraq were arbitrarily drawn by colonial powers decades ago, and there may very well be some redrawing of those boundaries after colonial powers are gone. It's for the Iraqis to determine, not hamfisted fuckups of the West.
Are you saying we should care for humanitarian reasons? We've killed 10,000 Iraqis in a year! Is it because of the oil? Or Israel? If it's the latter two reasons, we should be having a national discussion about this and quit making stuff up about why we're there. In the meantime, we shoud be planning our exit strategy and looking for less volatile fuel sources.
- tom moody 4-11-2004 7:26 pm